


The Wisdom We Have Lost in Knowledge

by bellatemple



Category: The Librarians (TV 2014)
Genre: Abduction, Aphasia, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Flashbacks, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Mind Manipulation, Non-Sexual Bondage, Panic Attacks, Partial amnesia, Psychological Horror, but well-warned is well-armed, excessive poetry, these tags are maybe making it seem more hardcore than it is
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-24
Updated: 2018-01-24
Packaged: 2019-03-08 21:51:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,874
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13467288
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bellatemple/pseuds/bellatemple
Summary: Stone is in some deep trouble when a trio of goons use him to get leverage over Baird, and with her, the Library. Especially when one of them has the power to strip him of what he loves most.





	The Wisdom We Have Lost in Knowledge

**Author's Note:**

> Well this is the longest thing I've written in forever. And it's really heavy on the id. I know I'm not the only Librarians fan out there hungry for more Stone whump, right? 
> 
> The title comes from a TS Eliot quote.

Jake honestly wouldn't have thought it possible, but it turned out being strung up by the ankles might actually be worse than being strung up by the wrists. Admittedly, he probably wouldn't have put that much thought into it at all, were it not for the unfortunate fact that Librarians apparently got themselves strung up in one way or another _all the damn time._

So. Things that were terrible about being strung up by the wrists: Rope burn. The skin on your wrists was incredibly thin, and even really nice rope was bound to chafe like crazy. Also, wrists were fairly delicate joints that were not made to support your entire weight like that for long. See also, shoulders. Plus, you had no idea what to do with your head. It inevitably hung forward despite your best efforts, and then you felt like an idiot in front of all your new frost giant friends who were preparing to eat you. 

To sum up, there was nothing good about being strung up by your wrists. 

But, now, here was the thing: take all of that and sub "ankles" and "hips" for "wrists" and "shoulders", throw in having to either hold your arms — and your shirt — down or up or whatever while you were at it, and the likelihood of landing on your head when you finally got out of it, and you had being strung up by your ankles. 

Oh, and there was all the blood rushing to your head. Couldn't forget about that. 

Jake was pretty sure he was going to be sick. 

The spinning and swaying wasn't helping at all. Of course, that was his own damn fault, really. It had started when he tried to reach up and untie his ankles. He hadn't even managed to touch his ankles, and now his abs hurt and he was spinning in a slow circle and he was definitely adding crunches to his exercise routine when he got out of this one. Even if they made Jones say he exercised like a girl. Which was stupid for a number of reasons, but some insults were just ingrained in Jake's psyche and very hard to resist, okay? Besides, what would Jones know about being strung up any which way, anyway? 

. . . Actually, probably a lot. He was the Library's premiere escape artist, after all. 

Jake absolutely refused to play "what would Jones do" while hanging upside down from the ceiling. 

Once he finally gave up on untying himself, there was the boredom to content with. He had never been good at being bored. If he had, he might have been happier sticking around his podunk little town his whole life, for one thing. He definitely wouldn't have ended up inventing so many scholarly aliases. But idly swinging back and forth by your ankles wasn't exactly intellectually stimulating. He wasn't even being held in an interesting building or anything. Really, what kind of self-respecting villain strung a guy up by his ankles but didn't even invest in, say, a proper dungeon? Granite blocks might not seem fascinating to most, but you could tell a lot about a castle by its masonry. All he could tell about this place was that, with the beige drywall and acoustic ceiling tile, he was probably in some anonymous office block somewhere. Judging by the wear on the blue-grey, low-pile industrial carpeting, he was willing to guess it'd last been renovated in the '90s — but he was an architecture guy, not an interior decorator. 

Right. Well. That probably killed all of three minutes. At least it distracted him a little from the crushing pain in his ankles. Or the pound of too much blood in his head. Or that goddamn ringing in his ears. 

_Hear the loud alarum bells —_  
Brazen bells!  
What tale of terror, now, their turbulency tells!  
In the startled ear of night  
How they scream out their affright!  
Too much horrified to speak,  
They can only shriek, shriek. . . . 

Ah yes. When in doubt, he could always count on poetry. Though — maybe not _Poe_ , right now. 

He ran through a bit of Keats instead, slowly, savoring the rhythm and cadence of the verse. When he got tired of Keats, he moved on to Rosetti, but she was almost as bad as Poe. The _Goblin Market_ didn't have quite the same charm when you had to wonder if it wasn't really a giant metaphor for women's sexuality, but a description of an actual market. Best to switch to Whitman for awhile; at least he didn't hide his sexual themes in poems purportedly for children. Jake was idly pondering academic thesis statements about the transition to overt sexual themes in western poetry — not exactly a groundbreaking analysis, but hey, he wasn't at his best, here — when he heard a door slam down the hall, and went back to focussing on trying to get himself free. 

Which of course just resulted in him being red-faced, panting, and twisting slowly in the wind when it was finally time to face his captors. 

Seriously. He really needed to start working on his core. 

There were four of them, as best as he could tell. He was all but blinded by the hallway light and they filled the door to the — office? Closet? — they'd tied him up in. Three of them had short hair, military short, with the posture to match, though it looked like they might have gone a bit overboard with their civilian clothing. Even through the afterimage Jake was pretty sure one of them had on a fisherman's vest. The fourth, though, at the front of the group, she was — 

"Stone!" She rushed forward and had to crouch down to look him in the eye. "Are you alright?" 

Jake offered her his forearm. "Baird." 

Baird bumped her arm against his, though he could tell her heart wasn't in it. "Here, let me get you down from there." She straightened, steadying him with an arm around his knees, and reached for the rope around his ankles. 

It made a certain amount of sense that she was here. The last thing he remembered before waking up upside down was stepping through the back door with her to go investigate a case. One which had probably turned out to be a trap, unless these goons were remarkably lucky. Jake and Baird were a force to be reckoned with — they had to have been caught completely by surprise. 

Jake swallowed against the buzz of anxiety rising in his belly. There was no reason for him to be suspicious of Baird, even though he was all trussed up and she was free to walk around and just decide to untie people. She must have escaped her own office-park dungeon somehow. "Who are your friends?" 

"The Library has no friends here," the man in the vest said. Stone still couldn't make out the details of his face. "You've seen him, Guardian. Now step away." 

Or, you know, maybe he was tied up because they wanted to use him as a hostage to make Baird cooperate. Somehow, that didn't make him feel any better than being suspicious of Baird had. 

Baird turned to face them, her arm still wrapped around Jake's knees. "Let me cut him down," she said, a pleading tone under her usually no-nonsense voice. "He's no good to you dead." 

Dead? Did people actually die of being hung upside down?! 

"His only worth to us is his worth to you." This from the tallest of the goons, who near as Jake could tell seemed to be wearing some kind of comic book t-shirt. Who the hell had made these guys' disguises? He was a beefy looking guy, too; the logo on his shirt was all busted up and stretched across the middle. 

"Exactly." Baird widened her stance, her voice firmed up. "So he's worth nothing to you dead!" 

Jake pulled at his bindings, hoping that Baird's grip on his legs might give him better leverage to at least loosen them. This conversation didn't much sound like it was going to turn out super well for him. 

"Bryce," Fisher-vest barked. "Show the Guardian we mean business." 

Baird let Jake's knees go and stepped in front of him. Jake balled his fists, determined to at least punch some kneecaps before he went down. But all that seemed to happen was the third man, the one just wearing a bad suit instead of some ridiculous shirt or vest, reached into his inside pocket. 

And the ringing in Jake's ears got a lot louder. 

"What are you doing?" Baird asked. Jake pressed his arms to his ears, barely able to hear her over the sound. 

"We're taking him apart," Fisher-vest said. "Piece by piece." 

The pain slammed into Jake hard enough to set him swinging. His head snapped back as the sensation drowned out the entire world around him. Sight, sound, even his sense of his own body in space vanished in the face of it, an agony that went right past all the standard words he'd ever heard used to describe pain. He thought maybe he'd bit his own tongue, but he couldn't be sure. 

He didn't know for certain if he even still had a tongue. 

Time meant nothing, so he couldn't guess how long it took before the world slowly faded back into place around him. Baird was above him, somehow, her hand warm against his neck. The floor was gritty and hard beneath his back, and he thought maybe he could feel the roughness of the synthetic carpet in his teeth. Every nerve ending in his body was demanding attention, but at least he knew where they all were, again. The room was blessedly dark and quiet. 

The goons were gone. The rope of his legs was, too. And the ringing. 

"Can you hear me?" Baird asked, sliding her hand up to his cheek, then his hairline. Jake shivered. 

"Yeah." It came out little more than a croak, but it still made the lines of tension on Baird's face soften. He started to sit up, but fell back with a groan when his abs protested. 

"Easy," Baird said, scooting around to slide her hands under his shoulders and help him up. "Are you alright?" 

Jake sucked in a breath and managed not to gasp out loud as she got him upright and propped against the wall. "Sore," he said, and pretended the room wasn't slowly spinning around him. 

Baird nodded. "I'm not surprised. Between the position they had you in and the seizure —" 

Jake held up a hand. " _Seizure?_ " 

Baird nodded, shook her head, and finally shrugged. "Or convulsions, anyway. Whatever that Bryce guy did to you, your body did _not_ like it. If I hadn't gotten you down, I'm afraid you would have given yourself whiplash." 

Jake wrapped his arms around his aching midsection and leaned his head delicately back against the wall. "Jesus. The hell do these guys want with us, anyway?" He shot her a look. "Or I guess, what do they want with you?" 

Baird sighed, shifting so she sat leaning against the wall next to him. "Same thing all these nut jobs want. Power. In this case, I'm thinking whatever it is that makes a Guardian so much more valuable magically than a Librarian." 

"That's why they had me all strung up and not you," Jake said. 

"Yep. You're the . . . incentive." 

"You're sure they're not DOSA?" 

Baird sighed. "Not unless someone's taken out Rockwell. And if that happened. . . . Let's just say, it'd be _bad_." She glanced over at him. "Well. Worse." 

Jake opened his mouth, all set to offer a literary reference, some poetic kindness an 18th century writer had put better than anyone else ever could, but all he had was — emptiness. Silence. He snapped his mouth shut and rubbed his head, but kept drawing a blank. He knew a world of beauty lived on the tip of his tongue, but he couldn't find any of it. 

That was ridiculous. He'd literally just been reciting something a moment ago, before Baird and the thugs arrived. Something about — bells? Or horns? It'd been funny. Or spooky. Or maybe passionate. Was it Byron? Dickinson? He couldn't remember. 

_Oh god_. He couldn't remember! 

"Stone?" Baird snapped her fingers in his face, the lines of tension all back in force. "What's happening? Stone." 

She was sitting up in front of him now, and he had no idea when she'd moved. She had both hands on his shoulders, all the better to get him on his side, he guessed, in case he started convulsing again. He shook his head, not sure how to explain that he was having being attacked by panic, not magic.

"It's gone," he whispered, and hated how desperate he sounded. "Thousands of lines — phrases and verses — it's all gone." 

Baird frowned. "You're freaking out because you can't think of any _poems?_ " 

"I can _always_ think of poems!" Jake started to draw his knees into his chest, but putting that much pressure on his ankles set them screaming. Which . . . really. They could join the club. "Emerson, Blake, hell, any of the romantics. I can do Sappho in three languages, including the original Ancient Greek — but I've got _nothing_. I can't even come up with any Robert Frost!" 

Baird sat back on her heels, still clearly not getting it. She reached over to rub his shoulder in what she probably thought was a soothing gesture. 

"'These woods are lovely, dark and deep,'" she said. "'But I have promises to keep. And miles to go before I sleep. And miles to go before I sleep.'"

Jake soaked it up like a sponge. His breathing finally started to slow. 

"Let me guess." He offered her a weak smile. "High school English?" 

Baird smiled ruefully back. "The Muppet Show. I can do the Jabberwocky, too, but you asked for Frost." 

Jake nodded, closing his eyes to better hold the stanza in his mind. "Thank you." 

"You're welcome." He heard her settle back against the wall again, then felt her hand on his knee. "Try to relax. You've clearly rattled that giant brain of yours around enough today. I'm sure it'll come back to you." 

"Yeah," Jake agreed. "I'm sure that's it." 

There. Now they were both liars.

*

The goons came back for Baird not much later. The ringing started up in Jake's ears again, he noticed, not long before they appeared at the door. He tried to get up on his feet and help her fight them off, ache in his legs and head be damned, but he only made it halfway before — whatever they were doing — tried to swallow his head again, driving him back to his knees. Jake bit back a moan, struggling to focus as the goons laughed. Baird put herself between them and him again. Jake knew that as a Guardian, sticking herself between him and danger was literally part of her job, and there was no one else he'd rather be there. But that still stung.

"Leave him alone," Baird ordered. "I'm cooperating, alright?" Jake was both hopeful and terrified that she might be bluffing. He remembered what they said before they took him down, about taking him apart piece by piece. They'd somehow taken poetry from him, already. He didn't want to find out what else they could take. 

At least this time he wasn't losing consciousness. Maybe that meant they weren't digging into his brain that deep. 

The pain didn't fade until the door closed behind Baird and the goons. The ringing kept up for several minutes longer before it disappeared as well. He thought maybe it might have something to do with proximity. Hopefully that meant he could use it as an early warning, prepare himself for their arrival, somehow. 

The stanza Baird had quoted cycled through his head on repeat, like the refrain of a song heard too many times on the radio. "These woods are lovely, dark and deep, but I have promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep and miles to go before I sleep. . . ." He muttered it under his breath as he pulled himself together, easing gingerly to his feet and taking stock of the room. "Simple iambic tetrameter. These _woods_ are _love_ ly _dark_ and _deep_." That was probably why she remembered it so well. Still, it was too easy to get lost in a rhythm that doesn't change like that. "And _miles_ to _go_ be _fore_ I _sleep_. . . ." It turned the whole thing into a chant, draining it of meaning. Like when you said a word too many times in a row.

It was starting already. The words were breaking down into sounds only loosely held together by the pattern of emphasis. He'd switch to analyzing another section, but right now those four lines were the only poetry he knew. Even nursery rhymes escaped him. He should have asked Baird for more. His mind clung desperately to the words, hard-won analytic skills drilling away into already well-worn crevices, set to grind Frost's work to dust. 

Still, at least he had these tools. The goons may have taken actual poems, all those beautiful, astonishing words, but they couldn't take his love from him. He was reminded of something his high school English teacher had said once at the end of class, just before Jake graduated and gave up formal training for good: 

"You can have the worst job in the world. But you can still read wonderful novels." 

Mr. Howard was never going to know how much those words meant to Jake. He'd been fully committed to his costume by then, deliberately tanking the occasional test or paper when he worried people might be catching on to how smart he really was. Mr. Howard never knew him as more than a frustrating jock, as wasted potential, but his words had saved Jake's life more than once. 

And then the Library had come along, and stopped Jake from even needing that kind of saving again. It might mean knowing intimately how it felt to be strung up by various joints, but being a Librarian was the still best job in the world. 

He couldn't let these creeps use him to control Baird. Even if it meant sacrificing himself — or the parts of himself that made his life worthwhile. He couldn't let these people hurt the Library. 

It didn't take long to take stock of the room. It was seriously dim, the only light coming in through the cracks around the door, but Jake had been sitting in there in the dark now long enough to be able to make out plenty of detail, including the paler, flatter spots on the carpet indicating where furniture had been removed. The place had been emptied out fairly recently, by Jake's guess. The only thing of any use was the rope that had hung him from the ceiling. There wasn't much of it left up there, maybe half a foot or so sticking out between the tiles, the rest lying in a torn heap on the floor where Baird had left it after cutting him down. Still he thought maybe he could use it to get up into the crawl-space above the acoustic tile. He didn't know for sure if there'd be enough room up there to escape through; movies regularly got details like that wrong, and he'd never bothered to study late 20th century cookie-cutter office parks. He might have gone through a whole parking garage phase when he was feeling rebellious in his early 20s, but there was boring and then there was _boring_. 

Jones would probably know all about crawl spaces in commercial buildings. Jake tried not to think about that. Or why Jones was always the one he felt rivalry towards. 

Instead he let his mind drift back to his little piece of poem as he jumped for the rope and tried not to twist his ankles when he missed. He translated it into Spanish, trying to find just the right words to preserve the rhythm and rhyme scheme both. Once he felt he had a decent translation, he swapped to Russian. He decided that was too easy — Russia was full of snow and woods, after all — and was just pondering switching to Navajo when he finally managed to pull himself up enough to get his hand around the pipe the rope had been tied to. 

His ears were ringing. 

_Crap_. 

He tried to guess based on the volume of the sound how much time he might have before the goons got to the door. Even if he made it into the crawl space, it'd be immediately apparent which way he'd gone. He could climb back down the rope and try to get the tiles back into place to try to mask what he was doing, but his body was already protesting all the climbing around. He probably wouldn't be able to make the landing quiet enough not to tip them off anyway. The ringing got louder, pulsing in time to the thump of his heart, and he made his decision. He wouldn't be able to run fast enough, not right now, and there was no hiding what he was up to. He was going to have to fight them. 

As though he'd somehow heard Jake's thoughts — which, hell, was not outside the realm of possibility, here — he heard Fisher-vest through the door: "Bryce. Secure the hostage." 

It was like someone set a warhead off in his brain. 

Every muscle in Jake's body knotted up at once, then abruptly went slack. He landed like a sack of potatoes, unable to break his own fall, or even summon up the brain power to care. The sensation went beyond pain. If the goons had this sort of fire power, he didn't know why they didn't just launch a full frontal assault on the Library and be done with it. They could probably strip its defences in minutes. 

They'd already stripped all of his. 

He vaguely heard Baird call his name and one of the goons mutter something about the ceiling before his consciousness gave up the ghost entirely.

*

He came to in motion.

It took a second to identify the rumbling, bumping sensation of a truck of a rough road, a fact that he found vaguely surprising considering his former career as a well-driller. It'd been a little while, though; as a Librarian more often than not he travelled on foot. 

Plus, he wasn't real used to riding in trucks prone on his back. 

He held still and tried to keep his breathing deep and even. The events leading up to this inglorious position were unfortunately clear in his head. He could hear the voices of his captors as they muttered intermittently to each other, but he couldn't tell what they were saying. He couldn't even tell what language they were speaking. 

He wasn't entirely sure it was a language at all. 

Bile began to build in the back of his throat, a small, bitter ball of dread that left a burnt trail from his belly to his mouth. The unintelligible sound of the goons conversing reminded him sharply of his experience a few weeks back in the Devil's Forest, and he could feel the terror of those first moments after the vines had grabbed him boil in his chest. 

He was paralyzed, his body simultaneously expanding and disintegrating. Voices filled his head with unfamiliar sounds, words and concepts for which he had no frame of reference. The voices both lulled and demanded, and he couldn't breathe. His lungs were missing. In their place was a solid trunk, and he couldn't even remember how breathing worked. He only knew it was something he needed desperately to do. The voices whispered to him, and his linguist mind strained to comprehend even as it panicked — he panicked — _they_ panicked — 

Jake panicked. 

He hadn't been restrained, here in the truck, and his muscles were flesh, not wood. He panicked into motion, fists and feet flying out, catching car seats and plastic panelling and finally a body, one of the softer parts, like a thigh or a torso. 

Baird grunted, and Jake found some room in his head to feel guilty for hitting her. 

She called something, a word maybe, short and sybillant and hollow, and Jake still couldn't understand. Where the hell had Baird learned the language of the men who took them? Was it a military thing, or had they brainwashed her somehow? And if they'd done that, what the hell use could they still have for him? He opened his mouth to ask one or all or _any_ of those questions, but all that came out was a gasp as he realized he didn't know how. His head was full of words and questions, but he couldn't remember how they were formed, what shape they were supposed to take in the air. Baird and the others could be speaking English or Greek or — or Klingon for all he could tell. It was all the same to him now. 

They'd taken _language_. The bastards had stolen poetry first and now they'd taken words themselves. How long before they had everything in him, every last bit that made him human? 

Baird was still talking to him, loud and slow, for all the good that did him. She had both her hands on his face, holding his head still. He realized with a start that she was kneeling on his hands, pinning him to the dirty floor of — it was a van, not a truck. One of those big old 1970s things with a removable central bench seat. He was lying on the floor in the middle of a van, with Baird on top of him and one of the goons — Bryce, the worst of them all — watching from the back seat. There were long rips in the fabric that lined the ceiling, and Jake caught sight of a "Make love, not war" sticker on the window on the sliding side door. 

A sticker, he realized, that he was _reading_. Backwards, even. 

Jake stopped struggling under Baird's grip and spent a few moments just breathing. Baird continued to bark — something — at him, but she wasn't making any more sense than she had since he'd woken up. How. . . ?

Of course. Reading and writing and speaking and listening were different skills. Not just in the process of learning a language, but in the brain itself. Brain-damaged patients suffering from aphasia could sometimes identify words in writing that they couldn't say out loud. And that's what he was now, wasn't it, thanks to these bastards. 

He was brain-damaged. 

Baird leaned on him harder, her face filling his view, and she repeated that word again, hollow but somehow also solid. A word for a concept both deceptively simple, but terribly important — and there it was again. They'd taken the thing itself: poetry, language, but not his skill at manipulating it. Not his ability to analyze. To learn.

His name. That was what the word was. Baird was calling his name. Over and over to try and stem his panic. Not "Jake", she never called him that. 

"Stone." 

He swallowed against the ball of terror still lodged in his throat and finally met her eyes. 

"Stone?" She added something else, something inexplicable that was probably just "are you with me?" Jake nodded. His eyes burned. She nodded back and said something else, something soft and relieved, and climbed off of him, tugging him up off of the floor as she went. 

The world spun, but Jake was getting pretty used to that. He just relieved to be upright again. Baird seemed to notice anyway, speaking softly as she helped him lean against the side door. 

One of the goons said something — Fisher-vest, Jake thought, though the man was in the passenger seat so he couldn't tell for sure. By the look on Baird's face, Jake gathered it was pretty insulting. All three goons laughed. Jake leaned his head back against the door and scanned the interior again, letting the conversation wash over and around him, looking for clues or anything he could use to help get Baird out of this. 

It was amazing, the things you found to read when you had nothing else to do. Jake had always been a reader. He was one of those kids who taught themselves, according to his mom, though he'd learned just as fast to keep that fact on the down-low. Kids who didn't have a lot to look forward to in life tended to resent the hell out of anyone who did. If you were a jock, they assumed you could beat their ass if they tried to hassle you about it. As a brain, you just looked weak. 

Being the smartest kid in class had only ever made him a target, and after his mom died, he got plenty of that at home. So Jake had learned to lie low and fake his way through life. He still read every damned thing he could get his hands on, though. Cereal boxes, when he was stuck making his own breakfast every morning. Sports magazines, which were the only things resembling books his dad bothered to keep around the house. Shampoo bottles in the shower, "inspirational" posters on the walls at school. Warranty manuals at his dad's job sites. He'd read and practically memorized every piece of paper in his dad's truck by age ten, from the registration and insurance paperwork to the factory repair manual Isaac kept for emergencies. Now, he found himself reading McDonalds receipts from the van floor, and every passing sign that he could see without getting up. 

They were on their way to Portland, he realized. The case had been in Washington, but who knew where the goons had stashed them after taking them down. They weren't far from the city now; though; he and Baird were running out of time to make their escape. He caught Baird's eye and tried to let her know without words that he'd back her play. The look she gave him in return was equal parts guilt and pity, and not even a little bit understanding. 

He needed to find a way to communicate with her, and fast. 

Fisher-vest and Comic-book were in the front seats, unable to see what he and Baird got up to without turning around, but as far as Jake could tell, Bryce never stopped watching them. Jake accidentally made eye-contact with him once, and flinched when a blast of feedback smashed through his head. 

Bryce had his hands in his pockets, probably locked around whatever it was he was using to mess with Jake's head. He was going to have to be very careful.

Baird grabbed Jake's hand and gave it a squeeze, still wearing that look of guilt and pity on her face. Jake hung on when she tried to take it back again, giving her a determined look in return. When they'd sat there with their hands clasped long enough for Bryce to hopefully stop paying as much attention, Jake started tapping letters into her palm. 

Morse code. Not a language itself, and not meant to be spoken out loud, and thus still firm, albeit a little rusty, in Jake's head. 

WHAT'S THE PLAN?

Baird blinked, looking startled, but covered it with a cough. 

YOU OK?

Jake bit back his frustration at her wasting time. BEEN BETTER. PLAN? 

HOW MUCH DID YOU HEAR?

Jake closed his eyes and sighed. NOTHING SINCE I WOKE UP. LANGUAGE GONE WAY OF POETRY. He really hoped she followed that. He didn't want to have to spell a whole explanation out. Judging by the look she shot him, she didn't. But she seemed willing to take his word for it anyway. 

ON OUR WAY TO THE ANNEX. THEY'RE AFTER HOLY GRAIL. 

Jake suppressed a smirk. WHICH ONE?

IT MATTERS? Baird continued before Jake could answer. THEY KNOW ABOUT JENKINS. HAVE SOME MIND-WIPING ARTIFACT.

NOTICED THAT. 

Baird grimaced, and let out another cough. BRYCE HAS A SNAKE TATTOO. 

The goddamn Serpent Brotherhood. Jake had honestly thought they disbanded after Dulaque went down. THEY'RE AFTER CAMELOT?

Baird's answer was just a simple letter Y. 

Jake watched her in profile. The pity was gone, now, leaving behind only the guilt and a terrible sadness. CAN'T LET THEM HAVE IT. 

Y. 

Jake ran the stanza from Frost through his head again. He could see it in his mind's eye, the dark trees against pale snow, dark letters on a pale page, but he couldn't hear the words in his head, couldn't even begin to try to say them out loud. He thought of beautiful paintings, magnificent structures, and graceful sculpture, and he thought of all of it being wiped clean from his head. No more Leonardo Da Vinci or Paulo Coelho. No Dmitri Shostakovich. No Antoni Gaudí or Kawanabe Kyōsai. No Frida Kahlo. Generations of the world's most profound creators stricken completely from his memory. 

He wondered what it would be like to experience seeing the Pietà again for the very first time. 

YOU HAVE TO LET ME GO.

Baird pulled her hand out of his. 

The van stopped and the driver called something back over his shoulder. Bryce caught Jake's eye again, and Jake braced himself as the now familiar ringing in his ears grew to an agonizing crescendo. 

They were out of time.

*

Jake woke up, and Morse code was gone. Even SOS, which he was reasonably certain was a code _everyone_ knew, possibly from infancy, came up blank in his mind. He was pretty sure he'd known at least one other telegraph code, too, something Chinese, but he had nothing.

It was almost as if Bryce took whatever he'd last been concentrating on. He'd used poetry to distract himself, and then poetry was gone. He translated words from one language to another, and all spoken language got wiped from his head. So he communicated in code. And now he didn't know any of that, either. 

He didn't think he'd been out nearly as long, this time, though admittedly he also hadn't fallen from the ceiling. He was still on the floor of the van, though he'd been wedged semi-upright into the space between the passenger seat and the frame. The door he and Baird had been leaning on was open. Jake could see the bridge that housed the door to the Annex a couple hundred yards away. He wondered if they were parked this far away for stealth, or if the goons weren't entirely sure where the Annex actually was. 

It was really nice to think that it might be the second one. The Library itself was the worst kept secret in the magic world. It'd be great if at least the location of its tether to the real world could stay a mystery. He rather doubted it, though. 

Baird, Fisher-vest, and Comic-book stood in the grass not far from the van. Baird had her feet planted and her arms folded across her chest. Jake had no idea what they were saying, but he could guess by their expressions that the conversation wasn't going well for the goons. Jake shifted, trying to ease some of the ache in his neck, and groaned through the back of his throat when a muscle spasm shot hot lines from his shoulder to his skull. A hand grabbed his arm. The time for playing possum was over. Bryce had apparently stayed behind in the van as Jake's own private, horrifying jailor; and now he was dragging him to his feet. 

Jake was starting to wonder if painful tinnitus was just going to be a permanent part of his life, now. 

Bryce shoved him forward, and Jake went, playing up his weakness and dizziness a little in an attempt to lull him into dropping his guard. He wasn't going to get a lot of shots at ending this without either giving up the Library or ending up a vegetable. Being underestimated was his best — and probably only — advantage. He also needed to make sure they didn't take his strategic mind from him. He started reciting multiplication tables in his head, making up little scenarios to go with them. They had Cassandra for math, after all. If he was still a Librarian by the end of this, maybe he could get her to reteach him. 

"Stone," Baird said, as he stumbled up to her, then probably something like "are you okay?" which . . . duh. Jake just looked at her and swayed. For just a moment, she looked as if he'd punched her in the stomach. Then she squared her shoulders again and faced the thugs down. Jake leaned heavily into Bryce and wore the most pathetic mask he could manage. Maybe he'd have Jones show him how to pick pockets while he was on a skill re-learning spree. It'd be great if he could just grab whatever the hell the man was using to slowly turn his brain into jelly. The way Fisher-vest kept whacking him in the arm, making him bump repeatedly against Bryce's shoulder, he probably could have gotten whatever it was without anyone ever being the wiser. 

'Do it or your friend here is toast,' he imagined the head-goon saying. 

'Never!' he had Baird shoot back. 'Stone would rather die than give up the Library!' Not that she said his name, but he figured it had to be something like that. 

A sharp pain lanced through Jake's head from ear to ear and he nearly went down. 

_Six times seven is forty-two,_ he thought desperately. _Six times eight is — is —_

Honestly, multiplication tables had never been his strong suit, anyway. 

Baird let out a shout, and the pain eased off. Jake let himself hang between Bryce and Fisher-vest, peering up at Baird without lifting his head. Baird caught his eye. 

And winked. 

Someone who didn't know her as well as Jake did, like, say, any of the goons, probably never would have caught it, she pulled it off that smoothly. But Jake and Baird had been working and training together for years now. She was one of the best friends he'd ever had. He could read her tricks and facial expressions like a book — better, if his reading comprehension had gone the way of Morse code. She had absolutely, 100% _winked_. 

Jake slowly, subtly gathered himself, calling up all the lessons he'd learned from both Baird and the Monkey King. Even if Bryce did his thing now, even if he wiped every single moment of those lessons from Jake's mind, it wouldn't matter. Fighting was something the body knew as well as the mind did. His body ached, yes, more than he could remember it doing in a long, long time. But it was whole. 

Baird made a show of defeat, her shoulders slumping, her hand coming up to cover her eyes. She was a fantastic liar when she wanted to be. He remembered her telling stories about doing acting in school, and being in NATO required no small amount of subterfuge, either. She turned towards the bridge and the Annex entrance, and Jake felt Bryce's iron grip on him soften just a little. He'd have to take him down first. Bryce had the potential to drop Jake without lifting a finger. He caught Baird's glance and flicked it to the other two. She nodded faintly, and as she took her first step towards the Annex, curled her fingers one at a time into a fist and dropped it down low at her side. 

They both moved at once. Baird pivoted to throw a roundhouse at Fisher-vest — all her talk of "fight smarter, not harder' aside, the woman fought like a tank — and Jake snapped his elbow into Bryce's temple. Fisher-vest staggered and Bryce folded like the cheap suit he was wearing. The ringing in Jake's ears dimmed to a dull roar, and he nearly cheered. Baird had Comic-book on the ground before Jake finished turning back around. Fisher-vest started to straighten, but Jake got there first, locking the man into Baird's favorite headlock. Baird grabbed Fisher-vest by the hair and shouted in his face, but Fisher-vest just laughed. Jake tightened his grip with a growl. Baird yelled again, Fisher-vest shot back, and it was all kind of irritating when Jake couldn't actually understand all the posturing and threats. Finally, Baird let Fisher-vest's hair go and stepped back, nodding to Jake. Jake decided that meant "go ahead and choke him out now." If not? 

Well, that was Fisher-vest and his friends' fault for messing with Jake's head. 

Once Fisher-vest was on the ground, Baird dug around in his pockets until she found a phone. She offered Jake a worried smile as she spoke into it, then hung up and tilted her head at him, eyebrows raised. Jake shook his head and shrugged. He might not have known for certain what she said in response, but it was short and sharp and brought to mind the sound of an axe burying itself in a stump. Jake decided he agreed. 

He heard shouting from the Annex and turned to see Cassandra and Jones running up the road towards them. Cassandra was babbling a mile a minute, to the point where Jake was reasonably certain he'd have turned her out anyway. Jones said something in a dry tone that was probably vaguely insulting. Jenkins followed behind at a much more sedate pace, looking down at the three men on the ground with a level of distaste attainable only to the purest of Arthur's great knights. 

The grails — both of them — were safe again.

*

Jake would say one thing for DOSA: they were extremely useful when it came to disposing of goons who tried to harass the Library. Jake assumed that's who they were, anyway. People in military uniforms showed up and took the goons away without Baird yelling at or fighting them. It seemed like a fair assumption.

Plus it meant they weren't behind the goons in the first place, either. Which for Baird's sake if nothing else, Jake was glad to know. 

All that was left — hopefully — was finding the artifact that Bryce had used on Jake and reversing its effects. The whole Library team was on the case, all of the goons' personal items laid out on the central table. The group had apparently had a few magical items on them, which was disturbing. The magicometer or Jonesinator or whatever they were calling it this week hadn't zeroed in on the object in question yet, and the whole group was talking at once. Yelling at once, let's be real. 

And the only word of it Jake reliably understood was "Stone." 

He was tempted to tune them all out. His head was pounding, his ears were _still_ ringing, albeit faintly enough that he could mostly ignore it, and Jenkins' remedy, a hopefully analgesic tea, was as awful as the man's concoctions ever were. Jake might have hoped that Jenkins' new found appreciation for things that didn't taste like someone was trying to poison you might have brought some changes to his potions, but well. It hadn't yet, anyway. When Jake's head wasn't demanding his attention, the joints in his legs were kicking up a fuss — he'd probably pulled half a dozen muscles just hanging from the ceiling — and his back wasn't too pleased, either. He hadn't checked, but he could just tell he was turning into one giant bruise. The ceiling he'd fallen from hadn't even been that high, but he'd landed extremely badly. 

Plus, you know, there had been the convulsions. 

All told, Jake wanted nothing more than to curl into the blanket Cassandra had fetched for him and take a nap right there on Jenkins' desk. 

Well, no. There was definitely at least one thing he wanted more: his whole goddamn mind back. 

And if for any reason that couldn't happen magically, he was going to get a head start on relearning everything by figuring out what the hell the others were saying. Thankfully, three of the most gesture-happy talkers on the planet were involved, helping him work out some of the basics. 

"Me", "you", and other pronouns were easy. Cassandra especially did a lot of pointing. "The" seemed to be the article; English only really had the one, and Jake didn't think Jones spoke any other languages, so it was a fair bet that was what they were speaking. 

It was seriously bizarre that he could know that and not know even the simplest of vocabulary. 

At least, not out loud. Jake could still think perfectly well, and he was pretty sure that was happening in English, too, though he didn't know enough about neurology or psychology to know exactly how not having a spoken language should be affecting his thought patterns. He was afraid to check on written language after losing the telegraph codes with Bryce's last attack, but he was sitting in the middle of a _library_. He was literally surrounded by the written word. He took a fortifying breath and looked around on Jenkins' desk for something that didn't look like it was written in code. 

_The Joy of Cooking_. Huh. So Jenkins was exploring his new appetite after all. 

Even better, Jake could still read a regular, roman alphabet. Which meant there was a fair chance. . . . He found a notebook and a thick black marker, held his breath, and wrote. He held it up, then had to knock on the desk a few times to get anyone's attention. 

CAN I HELP? 

All four of them stopped in their tracks and stared at him. Cassandra threw her hands in the air and shrieked. Baird and Jenkins dropped their heads into their hands. Jones, naturally, smirked and pulled out his phone. 

Something buzzed on Jenkins' desk, and Jake unearthed a cell phone, the older, candy bar kind. It had one new message on it. 

_of course the brainiac can still read_

Jake glared up at Jones and showed him another way he still knew how to communicate. 

Baird clapped her hands, probably trying to get the group back on track. Cassandra held up a sign, hastily written in yellow highlighter. Jake squinted, then decided it read "ARE YOU OKAY????" He sighed and gave her a thumbs up, and she visibly settled. 

Jenkins came over, took the marker and notebook from Jake, and replaced them with the cooling cup of tea. Jake scowled at him. Jenkins scowled back, and made a noise that was either a cutting remark or a dramatic rendition of Jake's head exploding. 

Jake took the hint. 

Things quieted down from there. Jake sipped his tea and tried not to gag, surprised to find that he really was feeling a little bit better. He decided not to tell Jenkins. 

Jones let out a shout and held something up triumphantly. Everyone else crowded around too quickly for Jake to spot what he'd found, and he spent a moment debating with himself out whether it was worth the effort to get up and go look. He was just deciding to go for it when Jenkins' phone buzzed with another text, this one from Baird. 

_Do you have any puncture marks?_

Jake wondered if maybe he was losing his reading comprehension after all. Or maybe Baird was being affected by the artifact? He looked up at her and shook his head. She texted again. 

_It's a fountain pen. Filled with blood. Jones is reciting poetry in Spanish._

The idea of _Jones_ of all people getting his poetry and language skills — _his!_ — made Jake scowl, even as he patted his way up his arms, checking for wounds. He found one in the crook of his left elbow, just beginning to bruise. He held his arm out towards Baird with a nod. She nodded back, turning to say something to Jenkins. Jones practically launched himself across the room to give Jake the pen. 

The ringing grew in his ears like feedback, making Jake cringe, but it cut out abruptly once the pen was in his hand. Everything he'd lost came rushing back so quickly he nearly fell out of his chair. 

"— we reverse it?" Baird was saying. "Stone can't just carry around a pen everywhere for the rest of his life." 

"I mean, I can," Jake said, flipping the pen around in his palm, feeling 200% better just for being able to say that out loud. "But it's not the _best_ plan." 

It was an unassuming thing, the artifact that had messed so hard with his head, all black plastic and smudged chrome. Probably not more than 20 years old. He rather thought it matched the office he'd been held in, that way. He rather wished he could find the person who created it and punch them several times in the face. 

"Don't drop it!" Cassandra cried, looking appalled. Jake held the pen up to show he still had a grip on it. 

"'There is no lighter burden," he said, "'Nor more agreeable, than a pen.'" He smiled. "Petrarch." 

"And he's back," Jones groaned. "And more insufferable than ever." 

"If I might see it for a moment?" Jenkins asked, holding out his hand. Jake clenched his fingers around it in a fist. 

"No!" 

Jenkins raised both hands in a gesture of surrender. "I merely meant to see if emptying the ink reservoir of your blood might cancel the effect." 

Jake looked down at the pen in his hand and swallowed. "What if it just — spills everything he took out with it?" His mind was whole again. The idea of losing parts of it was about the most terrifying thing he could think of. 

"I assure you, Mr. Stone, it is taking an incredible amount of magic to keep your knowledge in a pen instead of in your head. Separating the power from the focus should simply cancel the effect completely." 

Jake swallowed. "Yeah. Okay." He grimaced. "Could I get a cup or something? So I can refill it, just in case?" 

"Of course," Jenkins said, and went to go fetch one. 

"What did it feel like?" Cassandra asked softly. "Not being able to do your, you know . . . art thing?" 

Jake didn't have to search for the words. They were all right there, waiting for him, in 64 different dialects. "Like someone had gone in and sucked all the best parts out of my head. Like I was hollowed out. No longer me." 

"You were, though," Baird said. "Even without all your knowledge, you were still _you_. Trying to escape, sending messages in code. Taking out those men. You never stopped trying. Never stopped _thinking_. I can't think of anything more Jacob Stone than that."

"But what if they'd kept going?" Jake asked. "They got _spoken language_. Who's to say they couldn't have taken all that, too?" 

"I am," Jenkins said, returning. "Your glass, sir." Jake accepted the cup, but didn't use it yet. He raised an eyebrow, waiting for Jenkins to explain. "The fact that it is a _pen_ is no coincidence. Nor is what you lost. Language, yes? Tools for communication?" 

"They got whatever I was thinking about," Jake said. "I was running verses in my head before they first started using it on me, and then I didn't know any poetry at all. I did translations and they got spoken word. And after I used Morse code to talk to Baird. . . ." 

"And you thought of nothing at all in your ordeal but those three things?" 

Jake frowned. "I checked out the architecture of the room they were holding me in," he said slowly. "And I had to think about trying to escape and all that. I guess it could have taken, like, physics or mechanics from those. But you're right. It only ever really took _words_." 

"If it's all about the pen," Cassandra asked. "Why could you still read and write?" 

Jake felt a smile tug at his lips. "Because they took poetry first," he decided. "Poetry's made to be spoken as much as read." He looked at Baird. "And you gave me that Frost verse out loud, not on paper." 

Baird shook her head. "Well, whatever the reason, it's about to be undone, anyway. And then we can put it away and make sure it doesn't happen to anyone else ever again. Empty that pen, Stone." 

"Yes, ma'am." Jake uncapped the pen and unscrewed the nib section from the barrel. He spent a moment just watching his blood flow back and forth through the ink chamber before cracking it open and pouring it out into the cup. It'd take a couple flushes of the feed and nib to clear his blood out of it completely, but he could feel the magic flex and then snap in the air around him anyway. 

"Well?" Baird asked, looking anxious. "Did it work?" 

Jake gave her an easy smile. "'Whose woods these are, I think I know. His house is in the village, though; he will not see me stopping here to watch his woods fill up with snow.'" 

"See?" Jones said, throwing both his hands in the air. " _Insufferable._ "


End file.
